these youngsters,’ said another man on TV. ‘They’re not giving up just yet.’
Something told Jessica that she had to harden her heart if she was going to get through this thing. Because what happened if the baby never came? What then? She didn’t know how she could stand it, or what kind of life she would have with Paulo, who wanted children as much as any man could want children, which was almost certainly not as much as she wanted children, or how this marriage could endure with disappointment haunting their home like a malignant lodger.
‘See you in a bit then,’ Jessica said.
‘See you soon, Jess,’ Paulo said, not quite catching her eye.
She used to drive him crazy. Now he acted as though sex was an exam he hadn’t prepared for.
‘Oh, my word,’ said the TV commentator. ‘He’s never going to get it in from there.’
A cone of golden light fell on Megan at her crowded desk.
She looked up from her computer screen at the skylight in the ceiling of the tiny room. To Megan it looked like a window in the kind of prison where they locked you up and threw away the key. The light and noise that filtered down indicated another world out there but it felt a very long way away. Yet she loved this room – her very first office in her first real job. Every morning she felt a shiver of pleasure when she walked into the little room. Smiling to herself, Megan got up from her desk and climbed on her chair. She was getting good at it now.
Three times a day she stood precariously on her swivel chair, its cushion worn threadbare by the buttocks of all those who had sat there before her, and she clung to the frame of the skylight, craning her neck. If she stood on tiptoe, she could see most of the school playground that backed onto the rear of the building. Megan loved to listen to the sound the children made at playtime. They were little ones, as noisy and smooth-skinned as babies. They sounded like a flock of ecstatic birds. She realised she had never had much experience of small children. She was so used to being the youngest.
‘Doctor?’
Megan spun round, almost toppling off her chair.
A crumpled-looking woman was standing in the doorway, nervously fingering a piece of wet kitchen towel. A child in some kind of miniature football shirt was shrieking at her feet. The woman watched red-eyed as Megan descended to her desk.
‘They told me to go in, doctor. The lady on the desk.’ The woman looked shyly at the ground. ‘Nice to see you again.’
Megan’s mind was blank. She had seen so many faces recently, and so many bodies. She got a name, a date of birth and took a quick look at her notes. Then it all started to come back.
The woman had been here a few weeks ago with this same small child, who was then in his other outfit of a grubby grey vest, and chomping on a jam sandwich.
The brat had run his sticky paws through Megan’s paperwork while she examined his mother, confirming her pregnancy. The woman – Mrs Summer, although as far as Megan could tell, she wasn’t married, and she didn’t have a partner called Summer – had received the news like it was a final demand from the taxman. Not much older than Megan, who was twenty-eight, Mrs Summer was already beaten down by motherhood. The apprentice hooligan with the jam sandwich was her fourth from a rich variety of men.
‘How can I help you?’ Megan asked now, relieved that the brat seemed more subdued today.
‘There’s been some bleeding, Dr Jewell.’
‘Let’s take a look at you.’
It was an early miscarriage. The woman had been depressed by the news of the pregnancy, but this was infinitely worse. Suddenly, catching Megan off-guard, Mrs Summer seemed to be choking.
‘What did I do wrong? Why did it happen?’
‘It’s not you,’ Megan said. ‘A quarter of all pregnancies end in – Here. Please.’
Megan pushed her box of Kleenex across the desk. Mrs Summer’s scrap of kitchen towel was coming apart, and so was she. Megan came out from behind her desk and put her arms around the woman.
‘Truly, it’s not you,’ Megan said again, more gently this time. ‘The body runs its series of tests. It finds some abnormality in the embryo. Why does it happen? The honest answer is – we don’t know. A miscarriage comes out of the blue. It’s horrible, I know. The thought of what might have been.’ The two women stared at each other. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Megan said. ‘I really am.’
And Megan was sorry. She even sort of understood how Mrs Summer could be terrified at the prospect of another baby, and yet devastated when the baby was abruptly taken away from her. A fifth child would have been a disaster. But losing it was a tragedy, a death in the family that she wasn’t even really allowed to mourn properly, except for these shameful tears in a doctor’s surgery the size of a broom cupboard.
Megan talked quietly to Mrs Summer about chromosomal and genetic abnormalities, and how, hard as it was for us to accept, they were simply incompatible with life.
‘You and your partner have to decide if you want any more children or not,’ Megan told her. ‘And if you don’t, then you need to start practising safe sex.’
‘I do, doctor. But it’s him. It’s me…partner. He doesn’t believe in safe sex. He says it’s like taking a shower in a raincoat.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to discuss it with him. And condoms are far from the only possibility, if that’s what he’s referring to.’
Megan knew perfectly well that condoms were what he was referring to. But now and again she felt the need to adopt a magisterial tone, to reassert her authority, to keep her head above the sorry human mess that pressed its way into her surgery.
‘What about the pill?’
‘I blew up. Fat as a fat thing. Got thrombosis. Blood clots. Had to come off it.’
‘Coitus interruptus?’
‘Whipping it out?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. You haven’t met him. I’ve tried, doctor. Tried all the safe sex. What do you call it? The rhythm section.’
‘Rhythm method, yes.’
‘Tried that one when the doctor said it was the pill that was blowing me up. But it’s when I’m asleep. He just helps himself.’
‘Helps himself?’
‘Jumps on top of me and he’s away. Then snoring his head off the moment it’s over. You would never get a condom on him, doctor. I wouldn’t like to try. Honest I wouldn’t.’
It was another world out there. The sprawling estates that surrounded the surgery. Where a baby was still a bun in the oven and the men still helped themselves when some poor cow collapsed at the end of another busy day.
‘Well, you tell him he can’t help himself. It’s outrageous behaviour. I’ll talk to him if you want me to.’
‘You’re
